Top all-time · #9291
Matt Stuchlik
Personal blog · blog.mattstuchlik.comprogrammingsystems
Matt Stuchlik's personal blog at blog.mattstuchlik.com covers programming and systems. Since 2024, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 13 times, most often “Counting CPU Instructions in Python”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-04-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked in discussions of a JSON parser performance challenge, where the posts describe optimizing a parser's hot loop and a final solution that ran about 10x faster than a one-shot attempt.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Counting CPU Instructions in Python2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-02-08
- Counting bytes faster than you'd think possible2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-07-22
What Hacker News says?
Thank you. Yeah, I'm doing all those things, which do get you close to the top. The rest of things I'm doing are mostly micro-optimizations such as finding a way to avoid AVX→SSE transition penalty (1-2% improvement). But I don't want to spoil the fun. The agents are really good at searching the web now, so posting the tricks here is basically breaking the challenge. For example, chatGPT was able to find Matt's blog…
Comment linking /2024/07/12/summing-integers-fast.html
on a deleted threadSubmitted Counting bytes faster than you'd think possible as a story · 154 points
HN discussionYou are looking at this wrong. Creating a json parser is trivial. The thing is that my one-shot attempt was 10x slower than my final solution. Creating a parser for this challenge that is 10x more efficient than a simple approach does require deep understanding of what you are doing. It requires optimizing the hot loop (among other things) that 90-95% of software developers wouldn't know how to do. It requires deep…
Comment linking /2024/07/12/summing-integers-fast.html
on a deleted threadSubmitted Summing ASCII encoded integers on Haswell at almost the speed of memcpy as a story · 132 points
HN discussionSubmitted Recording and visualising the 20k system calls it takes to "import seaborn" as a story · 111 points
HN discussionSubmitted Counting Bytes Faster Than You'd Think Possible as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Huglo: Hyper-Ultra-Giga Low-Overhead Tracing Profiler for Ruby as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Syscall Showdown: Python vs. Ruby as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted CRuby writes files with 40% fewer syscalls than CPython as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Counting CPU Instructions in Python as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Sneaky 1-line change sped up subprocess#communicate 1000x+ as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Injecting syscall faults in Python and Ruby as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Counting CPU Instructions in Python as a story · 1 points
HN discussion